


Totentanz

by reine_des_corbeaux



Category: Original Work
Genre: All-Consuming Fear of Oblivion, Anal Sex, Biblical Allusions, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Drunk Sex, Extremely Dubious Consent, Guilt, Incredibly Gratuitous Latin, Loss of Control, Loss of Faith, M/M, Mutual Non-Con, Period Typical Attitudes, Plague, Unhappy Ending, Vomiting, mentions of past relationships - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-06
Updated: 2019-12-06
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:01:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21698911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/pseuds/reine_des_corbeaux
Summary: Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.(Spoiler alert: dying of the Black Death is anything but merry, and sexual intercourse while under the influence of the plague is not to be advised).
Relationships: Male Flagellant/Man Partying Too Much in the Wake of the Plague
Comments: 13
Kudos: 26
Collections: Consent Issues Exchange 2019





	Totentanz

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DeathCorporal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeathCorporal/gifts).



The sky was inflamed with storms and scoured with bells, and ash rose in fetid clouds to color the sinking sun red as the flagellants staggered into another town. The hymns they sang had a tone of tearing, ripped from filthy lips by some divine power, and the skin that clothed their backs was ripped as well, scourged and bleeding rusty red. Beneath the gray sky and into the red darkness of the sunset they wandered, heedless of the day, careless of the year, blind to the weather. The world was ending. Time no longer mattered. 

Conrad didn’t know where he was any longer. Did the towns have names now? Surely they must have, but he did not know them, and perhaps, with all their inhabitants dead, no one else did either. He followed the flagellants half mad with misery and half mad with self-blame, living corpse in a world of corpses. The scourge was all that was left to him now, the scourge, and the gray sky, and the reek of rotting flesh. That and the memories, but he tried to blot the memories out. Better to remember nothing and drive reason from the mind. Better to lose himself in prayers and exhortations. They would all die soon, miserable sinners that they were. The stench of death still clung to him. 

The sun had been pale and feeble at high noon, peering unhappily through the endless rainclouds, and it had reminded Conrad of summers before (and was it summer now?), of a paintbrush gripped strongly in his hand as he applied pigment to walls and panels. In his mind’s eye, he saw Margareta laughing, waving from the doorway of their mother’s house. 

“Brother, you’re home!” she’d cried, throwing her arms around him. 

They’d weathered many a winter together, but it was always summer in his mind. Conrad closed his eyes for a moment, and was Margareta fussy and demanding eels, their mother smiling. 

“Eels you want, and eels you shall have,” she’d said, and they’d eaten well that night. 

He remembered his first proper painting as a journeyman, how he’d painted his sister’s face on the Virgin in the altarpiece, telling no one that he’d done so. It had been the first time, but it hadn’t been the last, and many a St. Anne wore his mother’s face as well. Conrad thought he’d blessed them by making them saints, but perhaps he’d cursed them instead. He’d painted them into his final church painting, where every angel had Margareta’s face, and the Virgin, eternal queen instead of eternal maiden, looked every inch his mother. It had been a good painting, Conrad thought, particularly the grinning devils and the occasional skeleton. He’d always had a flair for the morbid. He’d put the last dash of paint on the Last Judgement, collected his pay, and began his journey home. 

There had been rumors of sickness in other cities, whispers of a great pestilence in far-off Italy, and elsewhere too, in Avignon, and in Narbonne. Conrad paid them no mind. Avignon was far away, and Italy was further still, but on that glorious day in early summer, Conrad thought that nothing could touch his happiness. As he walked the high road, he could already picture Margareta standing in the summer twilight, waving at him as he approached. 

The pestilence reached his home before he did. 

Conrad’s mother was sick in bed when he’d returned, coughing, shaken, and swollen, Margareta tending her. She’d opened her eyes long enough to see Conrad there, and pushed herself up to sit, even as Margareta tried to make her lie down again. 

“Leave now!” she’d cried in a voice hoarse with coughing. “Don’t let the pestilence spread to you.” 

And Conrad should have, but he saw the weary horror in Margareta’s eyes, and he stayed. Their mother died the next day, and already, the death-carts were making their grim rounds. He and Margareta could not follow his mother to the churchyard, but they walked behind the cart to the potter’s field instead, and watched as she was lowered into the pit. He held Margareta as she sobbed upon his shoulder. 

“We’ll be alright,” he tried to say. “God will protect us.” 

It came out a sob, one of many sobs to follow as the days became a blur of words and prayers. And God must not have been listening, or perhaps He was punishing Conrad for his arrogance, for painting his sister as a saint, as an angel, as the Virgin, because the pestilence came next for Margareta. 

Conrad nursed her as best he could, tried to calm her when she cried for water or for death. She lay in her bed shaking despite the summer warmth, stinking of sickness, her fingers blackening and her eyes as wild and diseased as her body. Conrad, now fearful to hold her hand, prayed for her, and tried to pray with her, but God, again, was silent. 

Margareta lingered horribly for a week, and died, with a great coughing of blood, on Sunday as the bells of the church rang for Mass. In the church, what few parishioners there were said their prayers under the watchful eyes of Our Lady, painted there with Margareta’s face. Margareta herself lay in her filthy bed, spotted and swollen, her eyes already far away, her breaths ragged and empty, each gasp bringing up a tide of dark blood. 

When she finally expired, leaving him alone forever, Conrad knew the world was over. 

He did not know why he had survived when his mother and sister had not, but Conrad did not see it as a blessing. His survival was punishment for arrogance, for lustfulness, for daring to believe himself happy, and for sins he did not yet understand. There was nothing he could do but try to atone. 

And so, he gave up his gaudy clothes for sackcloth, roughly cropped his hair (for he had been vain about it in the days before the pestilence), and made himself a rudimentary scourge to carry instead of a paintbrush. And he joined the flagellants in their wanderings and prayers. Anything to escape from a town that had become a tomb. 

This was life now, a life half-lived in the shadow of death, a life filled with a tumble of words in his head, prayers and memories all running together. Judgement Day was at hand, and Conrad could only weep and pray. Each new city looked the same, each with its gaping plague-pit, each haunted by the screams of the dying. 

Sometime, perhaps a month ago, perhaps a week ago, perhaps a day ago, the rains had begun. No flooding yet, but if there had been, it would have felt appropriately scriptural. All they were missing was an Ark. 

_But of course, there is no Ark. We’re the sinners God sent the flood to drown. He’s clearing the land anew with a pestilence._

Conrad didn’t have friends now. He had the men he marched with, the shared chanting of prayers, the shared eating of nearly spoiled bread. They did not ask him where he came from, and he didn’t ask them where they had once called home. Famishment and exhaustion became his life, and he made no paintings save those that he carved in blood on his back. Once he’d sworn by Fortune, empress of the world, and dreamed that she might not cast him down as she did all other men. Now, he knew he was only a spoke in her wheel. 

Like Fortune, the days changed. Winter came with spitting snow, and now, was it spring? People were still dying everywhere he looked, each new town filled with the same monotonous horror. And the flagellants walked through it all, chanting their hymns. _Dies irae, dies illa solvet saeclum in favilla._ It echoed through the air in a maddening swirl. 

All the chanting must have maddened Conrad too much, for when he looked up, his back bloody from the latest scourging, he was alone. The rest of the group was gone, leaving Conrad alone with a glouring sky and a sickly greenish sunset. The narrow street, overlapped by houses crooked as teeth, reeked of contagion, and he did not know whether he’d been left behind or turned astray. Or, perhaps, the rest of his brother flagellants were dead, and Conrad was again alone, rejected even by the pestilence. 

He didn’t know how long he wandered, but the rain fell when the night did, turning the street into a thick, fetid slime. Somehow, he’d come to a square of sorts, houses perching over stone arcades, the muffled din of people falling into miserable sleep echoing softly from inside the buildings.Suddenly bone-tired, Conrad ducked under the nearest arch. By the dark, heavy door stood an upturned barrel, and Conrad sat down upon it, grateful for the momentary rest. Beyond the arches, the rain fell in sheets, and Conrad’s head nodded as he sank into sleep. 

He woke, minutes or hours later, when the door behind him swung open and a tattered form fell out into the mud, singing in a muttering tone. It lay there at Conrad’s feet for some time, and then sat up. It was a man, his skeletal hand still clinging to an empty wine cup. Peering wildly around, the man’s eyes fell on Conrad. He smiled at him. 

“Even these days, _bibit servus cum ancilla._ And we’ll find one for you to drink with, brother, if you join us in the praise of the vine!” 

He raised his cup to Conrad, then frowned at it, as if he’d only just noticed the lack of wine. Standing, the man managed to slouch his way to the door and bang noisily upon it. 

“Anna! More wine!” he cried. 

Conrad let out an audible sigh of relief. Perhaps the drunken madman had forgotten him. All too soon, the door flew open, and a desiccated-looking wineskin flew out. It landed in the muck outside the door with an unpleasant sloshing noise. 

“Get out of here and come back later!” came a woman’s voice. “You’re too drunk, Johannes, even if we’re all drunk!” 

The door slammed closed again. Johannes, for that must have been the man’s name, picked up the wineskin, and refilled his cup. Whatever he was drinking smelled unforgivably sour, but he sipped it anyhow. 

“We’ll find another tavern,” Johannes said to Conrad. “I have money and they all know me. The world’s gone mad, but at least there’s wine, the great equalizer. _In taberna quando sumus non curamus quid sit humus,_ after all. And I’m sick of thinking about that, aren’t you?” 

“I don’t know what you’re saying.” 

“You’re not a student?” 

He looked confused in the grainy lanternlight, and Conrad looked more closely at his newfound companion. The man was filthy, that much was clear. His tunic was stained with wine and far too large for his frame, and his hair hung in lank, dark tangles over a high forehead and eyes of an indistinct color. In short, he was a ruin of a young man who might once have been handsome, with hair in clean, shining curls, and eyes flashing mischief rather than drunken desperation. 

“I’m a sinner,” Conrad said. “It doesn’t matter what else I was before all this.” 

“We’re all sinners,” Johannes said, words slurred with wine. “All sinners going down to the soil. Wine keeps us sane.” 

He brandished the cup again, stumbling towards Conrad on his barrel. Conrad flinched away from the fermented reek. It was bad wine: he remembered that smell from his apprentice days, when anything that got you drunk would do. The memories it brought sickened him: he’d been so happy in those days, drunkenly leaning into Heinrich’s side, stealing kisses from his fellow-apprentice and from pretty tavern maids. Where was Heinrich now? Where were the pretty girls? Dead, most likely. 

“No. I’m a penitent and I don’t drink strong wine. It leads to drunkenness.” 

“Better drunk than sober, brother. Tomorrow we die.” 

Conrad got a closer look at Johannes then, at the rounded lumps on his neck, the sickly cast of his face. He had the pestilence. Perhaps tomorrow, he _would_ die. And for the first time, the desire to flee from someone diseased came over Conrad. Johannes the drunken student was sick in body and mind. Not even scourges could save him now. 

“I’m not your brother,” he hissed. “I would be if you’d put away your wine and picked up a scourge. Mortify your flesh for God, and He might save you.” 

Something in Johannes’ face changed, a darkness stealing over his smile. 

“You’re a flagellant,” he slurred. “Rot in hell.” 

Conrad was taken aback, and jumped off his barrel, clutching his scourge like a protective talisman. Could he run? Why bother? Johannes was drunk enough as it was. He’d scarce be able to move to catch him. He’d stay. Stay and pray, and hope that someone might intercede. St. Antony perhaps, though Conrad was not afflicted with his fire. 

Johannes lurched towards him. 

“You walk up and down the streets, a gang of you each day, crying your prayers and chanting your songs, and you’re still going to die. You aren’t any better than the rest of us. You’re just miserable, and you want the world to be miserable before we all go. At least my sort, my student friends, we’re having fun. We’re going to the ground merry, not shutting ourselves up in a living tomb to keep from shitting ourselves in fear. So have fun, brother. Make merry. This world won’t last, and there’s only worms and devils in the next one.” 

He was close enough to Conrad now that Conrad could feel his breath on his face, smell the wine staining Johannes’ lips. They were full and rosy, and maybe, in a smile, they would have been beguiling. And then, Johannes backed away, and refilled his cup. He drank, and Conrad closed his eyes to pray. 

He opened them only seconds later, when he felt Johannes’ breath once again. He was close, too close, and before Conrad could back away, Johannes’ lips were on his. His body acted before his mind could tell it no, for how long had it been since Conrad had been kissed? He opened his mouth. 

A gush of wine flooded in, bitter and rancid in flavor, and he spluttered, nearly breaking away. Johannes’ hand snaked up behind his head, pulled him back into it, back to the winey flavor and the probing tongue. This time, Conrad couldn’t break away. 

He came up spluttering for breath, spitting out wine. But Johannes still held him tightly, almost as if he were afraid to let go. And then there was a cup at Conrad’s lips, more wine pouring in though he tried to resist it. 

“You’re so warm, and so alive,” he said. “The last person I kissed died in my arms. You should be warm before you die. And I want to feel before I die.” 

And then he was shoving Conrad against the slimy wall, groping at the front of his garments, pushing tunic up and hose down, gripping Conrad’s cock with skeletal fingers. Conrad tried to push away, but the wall was solid behind him, and Johannes’ fingers worked quickly, coaxing him to hardness. 

It all happened too fast in a mad blur of clothing, wine, and hands, pressure and pleasure, anxious bird-like hands. Conrad gasped. How long had it been since he was touched? How long since he’d felt the warmth of another person’s hands? He let out a moan, involuntary and miserable. 

“You like it,” Johannes said wonderingly. “I didn’t think you would.” 

“No!” Conrad gasped, but his voice sounded breathy and far away, somewhere lost in sinful pleasure. 

_It’s a temptation, like the temptations of St. Antony. You painted St. Antony once on a piece of good wooden panel, made his demons bright with color and seduction. Think about the demons and endure,_ Conrad told himself as Johannes planted a kiss on his neck in a parody of tenderness. But all the pictures in his head of painted demons couldn’t drive away sensation or the wrongness of the touch driving him to maddening pleasure. Against his will, he spent in Johannes’ hand. 

Johannes laughed wildly. 

“You’re just a man, flagellant. A man like any other, with all the needs of one!” 

He let Conrad go for a moment, and Conrad collapsed against the wall, limp and shaking. He should run now, he thought, but reconsidered as a pale beam of moonlight illuminated the buboes on Johannes’ neck. Was it worth it to run? He’d die in a ditch as easily as he would die in a tavern. Tears pricked his eyes, and Johannes took his hand. 

“We’re not done yet, flagellant,” he said, and beckoned to the tavern’s open door. 

Inside all was wood and dirty straw on the floor, stinking of wine and decay. In the glow of feeble rushlights, all the faces within seemed skeletal, halfway to their appointed dance with Death. A woman, wimple gone and kirtle askew, sat in a man’s lap, kissing him passionately, any semblance of propriety vanished with the life that had come before the pestilence. Others played at dice, drank wine, decamped to dark corners, all to the tinny, off-key music of a flute player huddled by the dying fire. All of them looked haggard, but if they were plagued, it was concealed by the inconstant light. The firelight danced and swam, casting sinister shadows across the sooty walls. 

Conrad had seen such tavern scenes before, but they’d never seemed so desperate. He’d never seen such hungry embraces or such fevered, exhausted gambling. Even the wine seemed to smell different. Perhaps it was old. Had there been anyone to bring in the year’s grape harvest? He looked about, and noticed Johannes gone. There was a brief, fitful moment of hope, and then Johannes was back at his side, clutching two cups of wine. 

“Drink,” he said. 

Conrad did, because he couldn’t think of anything else to do. 

One cup became two, two became three, and all the sour liquid poured down his throat as Conrad’s mind revolted against the very thought of drinking it down. But the wine calmed his mind and calmed his body too, and even Johannes, demon though he might be, looked angelic in the rushlight. And then, Johannes had his hands on Conrad’s shoulders. 

“You’re so warm,” he repeated. “It’s like touching life itself. I want to be alive again. It’s not about you. I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you.” 

And then he was shoving Conrad down on the table and pulling away his clothes. Conrad tried to close his eyes as he felt hands on his arse, pressing, searching fingers, moving with something like tenderness. It was that delicate touch, that sloppy, drunken attempt to care even as Johannes thrust a finger slicked with oil or spit or God knew what else inside Conrad, that sent him over the edge. The sounds he made were alien to himself as he laughed or maybe sobbed onto the oiled wood of the table. A pool of tallow swam in front of his eyes, and he focused on the breadcrumbs mired within it to bring himself through the pain and the agonizing feeling of fever-hot flesh pressed against his body. . 

_This is just another kind of flagellation. Bear it with tenderness and God will still smile._

The fingers disappeared, and Conrad found himself thinking only that he was empty, that at least when Johannes touched him, there was warmth. There was the memory of life. And then Johannes was shoving in, forcing his length into Conrad, and Conrad screamed. 

To his horror, it was the same ecstatic, pained cry he often let out after he’d whipped himself into a frenzy and trailed blood across the tapestry of old wounds on his back. That flagellant’s reaction to pain seemed to have found him even in the midst of shame. 

Johannes wasn’t good at what he did. His thrusts were the erratic motion of someone delirious with drink or fever, and Conrad thought, Johannes must have been using some sort of diabolical magic to remain hard. He fucked into Conrad with a sort of grim determination, as if he were completing an apprentice’s task- something dull, like cleaning brushes or priming a panel before the master began to paint. But his breath stuttered as if something about Conrad’s arse pleased him, or as if he were crying, and Conrad could only grit his teeth and bear it. 

His own cock rubbed against the table’s edge, a painful friction only made worse when Johannes seemed to find a tender spot within him that sent waves of cursed pleasure welling through his body. Conrad gasped, involuntary again, his length hardening. He was still hazy with wine, and trapped in this bright aureole of pleasure-pain, he couldn’t do anything but gasp and weep as Johannes thrust. 

It could have lasted hours, days, or minutes in Conrad’s addled mind before Johannes let out a grunting cry and pulled away. Something warm trickled down his arse, and he didn’t know if it was blood or come. Insensate with wine, shock, and pain, Conrad slumped against the table, his legs shaking too hard to support him, red rings of blood on his hands where he’d clenched his nails to his palms. And then he heard the soft weeping behind him. 

Johannes grabbed him again. 

“What’s your name?” he wept. “I don’t even know your name.” 

Conrad was not inclined to tell him, and he could not join his tears, his own eyes wrung dry from the pain and shame of all that came before. He looked through tear-blurred, drunken eyes at his attacker, whose soft cock still protruded from his filthy hose. The buboes at his throat seemed more obvious than they had only moments before, and had the black spots grown in the final moments? Johannes coughed, and Conrad could only think it sounded like a death knell before he floated away into sleep. 

***

Was it weeks or days before the plague carried them both away? Conrad didn’t know, but from the appearance of the first bubo after his waking in the dimness of a wretched twilight, he lost time in its entirety. 

Time might pass in gasps and starts where Conrad could feel his extremities swelling, or see black spots dotting his hands. It was in one of those moments that the shaking started and, and Conrad, though his mind screamed out a warning and his sick, sore limbs attempted to rebel, reached out to touch Johannes. 

“What is it?” Johannes muttered, bleary with the daylight or perhaps the candlelight. 

“Want you,” Conrad whispered, and pressed their mouths together. 

It wasn’t warm or soft the way he’d wanted, and when they kissed, Conrad tasted tears. He couldn’t tell if they were his or Johannes’, only that salt was trapped between their lips, like the flavors of the sea he’d never seen, or the eels he’d eaten once on a summer evening in the purple twilights of a lifetime ago. He found himself longing for the taste of wine as his cock stiffened. 

“Stop,” Johannes pleaded. “I’m tired.” 

“You never cared if I was tired,” Conrad said, fumbling to divest him of his hose. 

He didn’t look good bent over a table like this; he was too far gone in sickness, but Conrad didn’t care. Drunk on wine and the nearness of death, he plunged ahead, shoving spit-slicked fingers into Johannes’ arse. Though he couldn’t see his face, he could hear the muffled sound of weeping. Johannes always cried when he was fucked. Conrad always screamed. 

Like the all the other times since the first and since the beginning of the nightmare, the fucking was chilly and impersonal, driven on ahead by hopeless need for warmth, for companionship, for something they both wanted but that neither of them could provide. The sounds of flesh against flesh were sickening and soothing at once once he’d plunged his cock into Johannes. 

As usual, the tight heat of Johannes’ body drove Conrad into a state of insensibility, as he thrust and thrust, grasping Johannes’ hips hard enough to leave bruises. Even now, no longer a flagellant, no longer an artist, he still wanted to leave his mark on something. 

His breath came hard and fast as he spent, and air suddenly seemed difficult to catch at through his nose. Conrad paused, panting, grunting, to wipe away the dripping blood. So it was almost over then, this miserable existence. When the blood came, death came shortly after. 

Beneath Conrad, Johannes wept, as he had wept through the whole sordid affair, wept through his gasping orgasm and through Conrad’s. His wracking sobs were silent now as Conrad pulled out and watched him scrabble for purchase on the table. Bile rose in his stomach, fighting with vindictive glee. This too was usual. He hated Johannes for what he’d done and did, but hated himself all the more. 

Johannes opened his mouth to speak, but only gasped fruitlessly. He turned away, hand clamped tight over his mouth, but in his sickness, he could not conceal anything from Conrad. And so Conrad watched Johannes shudder and vomit up black blood across his blackened fingers. It dribbled to the floor and became lost in the rest of the filth. 

***

Conrad was too feverish to do much of anything on the day when he noticed that the flute music was gone and the tavern door was open, the grey light of dawn streaming in like some frosty absolution. Sometime in the days before, the tavern had become silent. The woman who’d berated Johannes was gone. So were Johannes’ student friends. If Conrad lay quietly on the floor, he sometimes thought he saw movement, but his mind was too far gone to rightly tell. Perhaps they were still alive, and perhaps he and Johannes lay alone with none but rats to keep their deathbed company. 

On the day it all ended, Johannes lay next to him, flushed and insensate with fever, and the light grew brighter. In that brightness, for the first time in days-or-weeks-or-months, Conrad thought of Margareta. She was there in the light, forever out of reach. She was dancing at a fair with Heinrich. She was eating eels with their mother. She was far away in heaven, where Conrad would never reach her. She was warm, and Conrad wanted to be warm. 

He reached for Johannes with swollen fingers gone dark with pestilence. Johannes was even further gone than he was, that much was clear. But he lay in a pool of grimy light, and Conrad couldn’t stand to see him there, so far away. He’d never see his family in Heaven now, nor purge away his sins in Purgatory so that he could hope for their company in the life to come. He wasn’t even certain that there was a life to come for anyone. So he would die with Johannes, joined and clinging to him like a drowning man in an angry sea. They would find the light or dark together, and it would be just outside the tavern door. 

In his last moments of lucidity, Conrad managed to grasp Johannes by the hand, drag him towards the door where they had met. He made it halfway out, half crawling, half walking, before the strength gave way, and he fell in a tangle of limbs with Johannes. His chin was on Johannes’ shoulder, their lips a breath apart. 

“I thought you’d died,” Johannes murmured. “I saw you drunk and dancing and then you were cold in my arms. But you’re alive, and I’m cold now. Kiss me back to life.” 

He tried to kiss Conrad, but he was too weak, and slumped back, eyelids fluttering in the last throes of life. In seeing his face, so seeming-innocent in near-death, Conrad let out a breath. It was time for death, for the ending of pain, and because there was no priest to succor him, he made the only confession he could. In his last moments, he offered them to Johannes as a sacrifice, or some profane Communion. 

“I’m Conrad,” he whispered to the man he despised and who hated him, and yet who’d given him warmth. “Not whoever it was you’re mourning. I was an artist once. Now I’m only a sinner. All this time, you never knew my name. But now you do.” 

Johannes only moaned with fever, tried again to press a bleeding kiss to Conrad’s blue and bloody lips. But both of them were too weak now to move, and so they simply held each other, bodies entwined. And as Johannes stilled, Conrad looked out the open door of the tavern. For the first time he could remember since he'd lost everything, the sky was blue. 

***

The men who collected the bodies said nothing about the filthy student and the man in flagellant’s sackcloth, but loaded both alike into the cart, unwilling to untwine their limbs. _More sinners for the soil,_ he thought. _Sodomites this time._ He’d seen it all before and passed no judgement. 

They were tossed into the lime pit without names or ceremony, anonymous and as soon to be forgotten as any other person dead of the pestilence. Already, they were beginning to smell. Corpses did, after all, and the loathsome miasma spread disease. Best to smell one’s pomander, if one could get one, and hope the sickness passed you by. 

The gravedigger, as he interred them, shovelling earth and lime over the day’s harvest of bodies, thought of a Last Judgement he’d seen once. It had been all fearsome devils and a cow-eyed Virgin he’d remembered as particularly well-done, blonde and smiling a secret smile. He wondered what the real Virgin, up in heaven, was thinking now, watching all the suffering down on Earth. Well, it was probably going to be Judgement Day any time now, what with the way people were dying of the pestilence. Best to pray and toss the bodies into the ground, and hope he’d go to heaven in the end. 

Conrad would have liked to know that someone remembered his paintings. 

But he was dead, and couldn’t know a thing. Johannes and Conrad sank into the earth to be forgotten, for no one who’d known them in life yet lived. Maybe in the future, say six hundred-odd years later, someone would dig them up and write a line or two about the condition of their tangled bones. But they’d never know their names. They’d never know or think of sins. 

Neither, for that matter, did the worms. The worms didn’t care one bit about plagues or Last Judgements. They were ignorant of sins as they investigated the new bodies, and prepared to commingle hedonist and flagellant in their guts. One squeezed its way between entangled, stiffened fingers. They knew nothing of Johannes and Conrad. They didn’t care. In fact, they merely had an excellent supper, and went on their way. 

**Author's Note:**

> ...this is why you shouldn't let medieval studies majors write plague-porn. We get bogged down in JSTOR-ing the most un-porny minutiae. 
> 
> Anyhow, a few notes for anyone who would like them. I had grand ambitions of writing something that was as historically accurate as possible, but then I got distracted by throwing in whatever thematically relevant bits of medieval Latin poetry I felt like adding and going for rule of morbid/rule of sexy rather than "EXACTLY AS THIS ONE RANDOM FRIAR DESCRIBED IT BUT WITH MORE FUCKING". So, er, sorry about that. 
> 
> As for the Latin (and some of the English), there's a slightly ludicrous amount of references to the _Carmina Burana_ in here. While the _Carmina_ predate the plague by a good century and a half, I felt it was a decent thematic liberty to take. Hence Johannes quoting 'In taberna quando sumus'. There are also quite a few quotes from the "Dies irae", because medieval apocalyptic poetry is fun to throw into medieval apocalyptic porn. 
> 
> Finally, St. Antony shows up a lot in invocations against disease, and the Temptation of St. Antony is a big thing in late medieval art. Couldn't resist tossing in entirely too many references to it. Also, St. Antony's fire, to which there are a few passing references in here, is basically an umbrella term for a few different skin diseases, but mainly ergotism. 
> 
> In short, I hope you enjoy this! It was ever so much fun to write (and I couldn't resist your prompt for symbolic memento mori worms, because what an excellent thing to want).


End file.
